Pip?

I don't suppose the Roamios with their faster chips and greater processing power and gazillions of tuners have added a picture-in-picture features, have they? I suspect I would have seen the whooping with joy threads if they had, but I just thought I'd ask .

It would have tremendous marketing value for sports fans. 4/6 tuners all displayed simultaneously, so you can watch numerous games in real-time. Only one tuner would be playing audio, but you could quickly glance around at scores. Switch between screens by number or arrow keys. The tuner with audio would react to trick play functions. Perfect for College/NFL football, March Madness, etc.

I don't think it has enough decoders to display a live feed of all 6 tuners at once. Although taking a quick snap shot of each tuner and putting it on screen should be possible. Not sure how useful that would be though.

I don't think it has enough decoders to display a live feed of all 6 tuners at once. Although taking a quick snap shot of each tuner and putting it on screen should be possible. Not sure how useful that would be though.

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What decoders are you referring to you? Let's say someone has a Roamio and someone in the house is watching live TV on tuner 1. And 3 kids are each concurrently streaming live TV to their own iPad via tuners 2-4. Wouldn't that be similar to the Roamio just showing a matrix of several tuners at once?

Or do iPads and iPhones actually decode the incoming stream instead of just feeding it to the iOS AV player?

Tuners are different then decoders. These are digital channels which means to display them you need a special decoder which can convert the digital information into an uncompressed picture. When you stream to a Mini it has it's own internal decoder that does this. And in the case of watching on an iPad the Stream hardware actually has a transcoder which does decode but then immediately reencodes to H.264 before sending it over to the iPad which then decodes the H.264 stream internally.

I believe the Broadcom chip they use in the TiVo can decode 2 channels at once, so they could do PIP. However it would need 6 decoders to do a live display of all 6 tuners simultaneously. Now they could use a single decoder to take a snapshot of each tuner and put that in a grid. They could even cycle through the tuners and update them like a slide show. But they could not do a live grid of all 6 tuners.

Or...how about a 65" in the middle with a Roamio surrounded by five 27" screens each with a Tivo Mini? All controlled with a tablet. Hmmmm, might have to set this up!

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Don't think that would work either. Not 100% sure about the Roamio, but on the Premiere there was a limit of 3 outgoing streams at a time. So the most you could ever do is the video from the main TiVo and 3 Minis concurrently. (although they may have increased that limit with the Roamio, not sure)

Up to eight TiVo Minis can be supported by one TiVo network containing either TiVo Roamio or Premiere DVRs. One tuner is used each time a TiVo Mini is being used on the network. Therefore, depending on the number of DVRs and tuners you have available, you may not be able to have all eight operating simultaneously.
TiVo Roamio DVRs allow for dynamic tuner allocation, so the tuner is only used when the Mini needs it and is released back to the DVR for use when the TiVo Mini isnt in use. TiVo Premiere DVRs do NOT support dynamic tuner allocation, so any Mini connected to a Premiere is allocated a constantly dedicated tuner and therefore reduces the tuners available for the Premiere DVR.

Up to eight TiVo Minis can be supported by one TiVo network containing either TiVo Roamio or Premiere DVRs. One tuner is used each time a TiVo Mini is being used on the network. Therefore, depending on the number of DVRs and tuners you have available, you may not be able to have all eight operating simultaneously.
TiVo Roamio DVRs allow for dynamic tuner allocation, so the tuner is only used when the Mini needs it and is released back to the DVR for use when the TiVo Mini isnt in use. TiVo Premiere DVRs do NOT support dynamic tuner allocation, so any Mini connected to a Premiere is allocated a constantly dedicated tuner and therefore reduces the tuners available for the Premiere DVR.

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This is only for Live TV, right? If you use the Mini for streaming only and never Live TV it doesn't ever need a tuner on a Roamio or Premiere, correct?